What’s next after Groveland Four?
In Lake County, it’s a new Confederate statue
Starting in the 1950s, when he was very young, Gerald Threat and his family would make regular trips from their home in Lake County to the state prison in Raiford.
There, they would visit Threat's uncle, Walter Irvin, who was serving a life sentence after being convicted of raping a woman in Lake County.
Irvin was black. The woman was white. Each visit, Threat recalled, his grandmother would ask Irvin, “Did you do it?” And each time, her grandson would answer, “No.”
Irvin was telling his grandmother the truth, and in 1968 he was paroled.
Threat recounted those memories this week at a Central Florida Urban League forum that posed the question of what comes next now that Irvin and three other black men — collectively known as the Groveland Four — have been posthumously pardoned by Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet.
But thinking about what's next came hard for many of the forum speakers at St. Mark's AME Church, possibly because they see places like Lake County — the scene of the Groveland Four injustice — still living in a racial past.
Exhibit A: The Lake County Historical Society competed for, and won, the right to house a statue of Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith at its museum in the county courthouse in Tavares.
The statue of Smith, a native of St. Augustine, has resided in the U.S. Capitol's National Statuary Hall since 1922. After nearly 100 years representing Florida at the Capitol, the Confederate general is soon to be replaced by a statue of educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune.
Smith was a stranger to Lake County. He wasn't born there. He didn't live there. He didn't die there. He has no connection to Lake County's history. And yet, the museum's curator, Bobby Grenier, saw fit to pursue a random Confederate general's statue at a moment in time when local and state governments are agonizing over what to do about statues honoring those who defended slavery.
The larger-than-life effigy will dwarf the museum's meager tribute to the Groveland Four, which includes a doctored photo that shows the outline of three of the young men after their arrest while omitting their tormentor — infamous Sheriff Willis McCall — who in the original photo is standing next to them. In fact, the county museum makes no mention of McCall's brutality and racism during his 28 years as sheriff.
African-American residents of Lake County were appalled to learn the historical society planned to relocate Smith's likeness to the very courthouse where some of the Groveland Four were beaten by the McCall after their arrest in 1949.
At a meeting in July, speakers pleaded with Lake County commissioners to do something about the statue. The county leases space to the historical society and provides funding, so it has leverage. But not courage. Commissioners — all of them white — wrung their hands and did nothing. Well, not nothing. The commission paid $3,900 for engineers to determine the museum's tile floors are strong enough to support the statue.
Commissioners now are talking about a separate monument to the Groveland Four in front of the courthouse, and maybe some additional exhibits at the museum about black history.
Well-intentioned or not, those moves feel like a distraction from the larger matter that haunts Lake County: An inability or unwillingness to reckon firmly and honestly with its past so that issues of race are no longer treated with a wink or a blind eye.
This is, after all, a place that has never elected a black person to a countywide office but in 2018 elected to the state Legislature Anthony Sabatini, who once dressed in blackface and, while serving on the Eustis City Commission in 2017, wrote on his Facebook page, “To any cities or counties that would like to donate their Confederate monuments to the City of Eustis, we will gladly accept and proudly display our nation's history. Thank you.”
It's understandable why people who spoke at the recent Urban League meeting seemed put off or flummoxed by a question of what's next. For many of them, what's next might feel like more of the same.
Editorials are the opinion of the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Mike Lafferty, Jay Reddick, David Whitley, Shannon Green and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.